record : Java Glossary

This is a very old term in computing. The equipment to sort, reproduce and list punch
cards was referred to as unit record equipment. Each of
IBM (International Business Machines) ’s punch cards could record 80 characters of
information.

When magnetic tapes took over, it became possible to store more than 80 characters
about a given customer together in one unit called a record. Because tape drives took considerable time to start and top and
required an inter-record gap, for efficiency, groups of unrelated logical records were grouped together into one physical record. Logical records came known as records and physical records as blocks.

C’s struct described the structure of one
record.

Because the format of binary records depends on the platform, the original
fiercely-platform-independent Java had no way of directly reading and writing
records, other than object serialization where all the fields in an object and
dependent objects were individually packed up and written as a lump.

With the nio classes, Java defines a platform
independent format for binary records and a way of reading them as a lump. It deals
with the platform specific conversion details only when you access a field in
record.